T - Drive to help you beat traffic jams
By siliconindia   |   Friday, 12 November 2010, 22:00 IST
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London: Scientists have come up with a new system, known as T-Drive, to monitor the routes and avoid traffic jam. The initial tests of a virtual cab driver have suggested that it could shave over 10 percent off journey times through crowded urban streets. The Researchers used three months of movement data, representing 400 million kilometres of travel, from a fleet of 33,000 taxis in Beijing. For a real-world test, the Microsoft engineers asked a pair of drivers to travel between two locations in Beijing : one was given a route suggested by T-Drive , the other used Google Maps. Averaged over 30 trials, the two systems produced routes that were roughly the same in length. But T-Drive seemed to know how to avoid stoppages: it produced average drive times of 23 minutes, almost 4 minutes faster than Google Maps. Yu Zheng, an engineer at Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing, said the advantage comes from the drivers' intimate knowledge of Beijing streets. The cabbies know which traffic lights are slow to change and which junctions get snarled up during rush hours. Zheng presented his work at the ACM Sigspatial International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems in San Jose.

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